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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969452">Aslan's Blessing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/jejeje117/pseuds/jejeje117'>jejeje117</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:28:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,219</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969452</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/jejeje117/pseuds/jejeje117</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Narnia is a powerful place, as is the blessing of Aslan. Over the course of their reign, the High Kings and Queens had grown wilder and wilder. Returning to England had not rid them of the influence, only given them incentive to hide it. Susan had forgotten, had lost it, but it had not forgotten her.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Aslan's Blessing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>It would seem that animal transformation fics are going to haunt me until I get one of them right. Sorry for this fic, I'm trying to do work and it's distracting me.</p><p>I've no idea why C.S. Lewis is in my head?</p><p>I believe at some point while writing this I read 'Settle Our Bones Like Wood Over Time' by madnessiseverything, so go read that.</p><p>Oh, I have no experience with PTSD beyond the documentaries my insomnia has led me to.</p><p>The graphic violence warned about? Not so much, but maybe because it seems to creep in.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Narnia is a powerful place, as is the blessing of Aslan. Over the course of their reign, the High Kings and Queens had grown wilder and wilder. Returning to England had not rid them of the influence, only given them incentive to hide it. Susan had forgotten, had lost it, but it had not forgotten her.</p><p>Older now yet younger than she has been, and the oldest she suspects she will ever be again with the agony afflicting her, Susan finds herself alone in a tidy little office befitting her position as a Professor of English Literature. She cares little for the confining walls crammed full of reading materials that will never measure up to the stories she sings in her dreams but her experience has given her the measure of sharing such tales and their meanings. She can’t teach these Englishmen the ‘Whisper of the Willows’, nor the ‘Ballad of the Calorman Squires’. She can compromise by using the cadences taught to her by the wisest dryads who’d visited court, and tricks that passing nobles had delighted in. She preferred it when Narnia had been but a fantasy, nothing real or concrete, nothing she could miss so deeply as to cripple her.</p><p>Narnian storytelling is half in the telling, and half is enough in this dull expanse of dead land. Her students often hang off her every word and Susan is grateful to see a spark of life, or fervour in their eyes, no matter how painful the reminders are.</p><p>Unfortunately every student has their own story, their own unique personality and characteristics. As much as Susan would like to rally behind little Janice Goodwin, five foot one but every inch a competent woman, the lady tends towards meekness. This land is no good for such things, as foul and mechanical and patriarchal as it is. Janice must learn to stand up for herself, Susan’s interference would do no favours.</p><p>Even so, watching students she’d come to respect crowd around a woman to spit vitriol at her purely because of her gender, as one of very few female students to make the program, hit all the wrong buttons. Especially as they are being taught by a woman, honestly.</p><p>At first Susan had thought she might be disappointed, a reasonable reaction after all. But as moments had passed, she’d recognised the emotional turmoil as something less containable. She’d been forced to signal for the assistant teacher to step in, a tall and imposing man who might once have played rugby who goes by the name of Michael Fairfax, and she’d retreated damningly quickly to her own office as opposed to the lecture theatre.</p><p>So now she’s trapped in, essentially, a small box. All the while, her own anger builds. And with it, impossibly, is the power Aslan called the Wild. She has to brace herself against the desk as sharp hot pain arches up her spine, roots itself in her heart, colonises her arteries and floods her musculature. The agony is impossible to measure, climbing with her fury, scrambling her brain until she’s on the floor begging for Aslan to release her.</p><p>They had all done the same once upon a time, all four of them, as the first of Aslan’s blessings had made itself known. Born children of Adam and Eve, Aslan and his domain had refashioned them to fit. It had been gradual, throughout their reign, but noticeable regardless.</p><p>There were reasons the Calormans called Narnians savages after all.</p><p>This is the change, Susan knows, the shift she’d thought possible only in her homeland filled with all things wonderful. Here in this frail, bland country it has no place. Where can she run here? What can she hunt? Who can she fight? What purpose does this serve but to punish her?</p><p>She has followed Aslan’s orders and suffered immensely for it, why does he inflict such torture on her now?</p><p>She thinks she hears laughter, distantly.</p><p>“Susan? Are you in there?”</p><p>With aching gums and a jaw that is continuously breaking and reforming, the once Queen of Narnia can manage nothing English.</p><p>“Leave.”</p><p>The command is half spoken and half thought, leaving her lips as a burst of syllables that do not belong anywhere mundane. However the voice at the door instead hits the door with much force, tumbling in with little grace. Susan is faced with cousin Eustace, his face pale and his mouth drawn into a thin line. He slams the door behind him with more strength than a man of such slight stature should possess and leans against it, slipping down to the floor in a heap. Instead of explaining himself, he only stares in horror.</p><p>“What is wrong, your Majesty? Is it a curse?”</p><p>She snarls involuntarily, her teeth now painfully sharp in all the right places, he voice a deep rumble that reverberates in the back of her throat. Still, to hear her own language from another helps a little anger to ebb away, anger that now seems to be frustration, defiance. The small space likely isn’t helping. Distantly she wonders when Caspian had told him enough to reveal her title, and wonders if it is genuine deference or something driven by fear.</p><p>Never has she been more grateful for their other forms having the capability of speech, for surely otherwise Eustace would have shot her for madness by now.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Then why does it hurt you so?”</p><p>She collapses in on herself, her human limbs too spindly for the weight they will shortly bear, her focus instead on her sharpening vision. Her improved hearing, as she registers the wet thump thump of a rapidly beating heart, and the repeated woosh of air filling and leaving lungs. Eustace, likely, is scared either of her or for her.</p><p>“You heard the legends. Of us. All of them?”</p><p>There is a pause, and then her cousin very unwisely rearranges himself to sit cross legged. Perhaps it is meant as a comfort to her, instead she worries that as her other, her true instincts, build- he is making himself vulnerable. He is presenting himself as prey.</p><p>“Reepicheep told me some, back when I was- when I wasn’t.”</p><p>Ah, Eustace had been shown his own true form, that of a dragon. While it had originally served to demonstrate the brat’s greed and selfishness, Susan suspects that Aslan had also given the gift again. It would be terribly funny for a dragon to rear his head in the middle of a well developed English city.</p><p>“I thought they were stories. You’ve- none of you ever-”</p><p>She sneers bitterly, more of a snarl really, and then is distracted by the itchiness that overtakes her. This would be the fur, she remembers.</p><p>“Not in England. This place is not meant for all of what we are.”</p><p>His face scrunches up oddly, possibly in pity, but this is not the time.</p><p>“Very shortly you will be trapped in a small box with a full grown Narnian Tigress. Might I suggest you leave?”</p><p>“But it’s you!”</p><p>“And was it you, who scoured those far away lands for live goats and cattle to roast?”</p><p>He flinches, but the stubbornness must be genetic.</p><p>“I trust you.”</p><p>“I am a tigress who has been trapped in human skin, starving and forgotten, for literal decades. My siblings are not here to contain me. The door may work.”</p><p>“These walls will not work, not when- forgive me, but you’re huge.”</p><p>Ordinarily a lady was to take offense, but none is meant in this case. Susan is no breed of tiger native to this barren land, she is built for the thick forests and sprawling hills of Aslan’s country. She is made to take down bucks that dwarf the local bulls, and recalls once swallowing an enemy Calorman whole with ease.</p><p>“Your Majesty, you won’t fit. You must stop, please.”</p><p>She does her best to withhold a growl, already restless with confinement, and the pit in her belly is a void, sapping her energy and her will to resist the call of the Wild. There is a resounding crack as the poor desk breaks above her, and then there are arms around her neck. All too quickly, Eustace is wrapped around her and begging.</p><p>The anger folds, not leaving, but giving way to shock, horror, and guilt thick enough to choke on. She keens, ears pinned back, because she has so little family left and is so close to losing another to her own madness. </p><p>The Wild gives, letting Queen Susan return to the fore, and then she has her own stick thin arms wrapped around the idiot.</p><p>“You could have been killed.”</p><p>For all that she is scolding and refusing to relinquish the Narnian tongue, there is an unsteadiness to her voice. Weakness made tangible. Eustace pays no heed.</p><p>“So could you.”</p><p>And this is true. She has seen the weapons used in the trenches, guns and the like, and she can well imagine what the police would employ against a monstrously large tiger half mad with starvation.</p><p>Starvation, she realises, that has not left yet.</p><p>Neither has the call of the Wild. Neither has the deep magic. Her breath comes in sharp, painful gasps because this presents not as an isolated incident, but something she must worry about for the foreseeable future.</p><p>What is Aslan thinking?</p><p>“Perhaps He is preparing you for a return.”</p><p>She can’t help a bitter laugh, cut short as she recognises the tone to it, her vocal chords no longer quite human.</p><p>“No, that cannot be. This is simply what He asked me to forget, and now I am remembering.”</p><p>“What does it mean?”</p><p>Susan stops, holds herself very still. It means she must attend to her lectures in this farce of a human skin and not tear out the throats of the students who were a misogynistic product of this poor society. It means she must force dull, stilted English to roll off her tongue when her mind has fixed back into a pattern of Narnian, Mermish, Dryad, and that mostly familiar language the Telmarines had turned Narnian into. It means that the Deep Magic is here around her, within her, coaxing the Wild back to life and rousing the High Queen again.</p><p>If the Deep Magic is here, so too must Aslan be, surely.</p><p>“It means I have a job to do, and if you’ll excuse me I must return to it.”</p><p>Eustace sputters at the indignity, and as Susan rises she realises that much of her clothing has torn or stretched beyond what is proper. While the trees wouldn’t mind and Eustace doesn’t faint at the sight, it isn’t fitting here. She scowls, and before she can call any coherent thought to mind, takes a deep breath to work through the thoughts cluttering her brain.</p><p>With the exhale, magic drips from her lips like honeyed wine. With the flutter of an impossible breeze she is clothed once again, not in her pinafore dress, but in her favourite gown from the Golden Age. Plush velvet and silk all in greens, browns and gold wraps around her like an old friend. Perhaps the embroidery is unfamiliar to these parts, and the cut outdated, but it will be of service.</p><p>“This isn’t happening, It mustn’t be. Oh by Aslan.”</p><p>Susan, caught between three different mindsets, ignores him to continue her routine. The Tigress and the Queen lose out to the base of Susan, currently a gainfully employed professor. She takes long strides back towards the classroom so as not to give herself the chance to turn around. She is not, she thinks, a witch as Jadis was. This is simply some sort of Narnian bullshit. Therefore everything must be as normal, nothing must have changed.</p><p>She is past Eustace and out into the corridor before her cousin can impede her progress.</p><p>The lecture theatre she comes across is full of, essentially, children throwing temper tantrums. Susan descends into the chaos with the composure granted through three wars and seeks out the eye of the storm. She quickly finds Janice practically cowering behind her desk at the front, with Horace and Gerard looming over her while Michael does his level best to pull the pair of idiots back without risking an assault charge.</p><p>Susan smiles, all teeth, and the fools fall back into line immediately. A hush falls upon the hall, much needed reprieve to her now ringing ears, and she uses it to help the poor woman up to her feet.</p><p>“Are you alright?”</p><p>To Susan’s shame, her English still doesn’t quite fit. There’s a melody she can’t forget so soon, the trick of it taught to her by her subjects. Janice only stares a little blankly. Bemused, the Queen turns to survey the rest of the motley crew, all of whom seem equally gobsmacked. Well, she supposes she’d never dressed up for a lecture before. With a sigh she retreats back to her own desk where a copy of yet more mournful poems awaits her. This set at least is centred on the horrors of war, she can forgive their authors for depression.</p><p>“We still have time left yet, please do take your seats.”</p><p>She had very much wanted to use richer words, and flinches at her own formality anyway. Seeming to notice her turmoil, Michael fixes his jaw shut, smiles approvingly, and retakes his seat at the side to better spectate. She grants him the tiniest of nods, then lifts her eyebrows until order finally returns.</p><p>After a whole hour of blasted English poetry punctuated by her stomach's attempt at band practice, Susan is relieved to call an end to the session. Whenever she pauses for breath, every muscle she knows of trembles as though she’s battle fatigued. Her lungs seize up regularly, her vision she is now sure is far too sharp, and she can taste the Wildness that perfuses her body on the air so badly does it want to take hold.</p><p>She does not, however, want to tear out Horace's throat with her teeth.</p><p>Much.</p><p>“Professor Pevensie, Ma’am, wherever did you get that dress. It’s beautiful.”</p><p>Ah, the lecture is over, allowing question time. Susan smiles as best she can at Janice, a little sympathetic as she herself has found it hard to procure decent clothing in recent years.</p><p>“It’s a dusty old relic I’m afraid, given to me by some dear friends.”</p><p>If she remembers correctly, the merfolk had conspired with traders from the Hidden Isles to gift her with their best work. She herself had replied by enforcing a patrol perimeter around their core tuna and swordfish breeding areas to ensure their continued good health. The giving and taking and gifts had lasted until her return, their chief himself had taught her mermish.</p><p>Well, she supposes if she tries it out in front of this crown it might as well be dolphin whistles.</p><p>“You look like royalty!”</p><p>In the doorway of the theatre, Eustace breaks out in a fit of giggles.</p><p>“I suppose you are lucky that I deign to teach you lot then. Any more relevant questions?”</p><p>More giggles, more awe. She’s dealt with far worse in Calorman courts but honestly, this is simply rude. Michael fortunately goes for a tension breaker.</p><p>“What’s your accent? It’s beautiful.”</p><p>She has to blush at that one, and honestly can’t find her way out, so it is her cousin who steps in and mercifully takes the attention away.</p><p>“All the Pevensies gained it, during the war.”</p><p>The straying into evacuation territory stirs up enough decorum for the students to settle, as well as Eustace’s own accent. His own forays into Narnia during the Telmarine occupation had left him with a less pronounced and more Eastern influenced version of her own accent. He’d let it come through on purpose, and she’s grateful.</p><p>With that Eustace turns to her very purposefully, and comes out with the boldest bit of dialogue she’s ever heard in Telmarine Narnian. The lunacy of it is baffling.</p><p>“Forgive my impertinence, but you should not have come back Your Majesty.”</p><p>She glowers at him, and lesser expressions had sent Kings scurrying back behind their nursemaid's skirts. Eustace doesn’t buckle, and Susan swears she sees gold in the shine of his brow, his shadow behind him larger than the light should cast it. Truly, the Wild is returning, and no wonder he fears for their safety if he too is so close to losing touch with his tame facade.</p><p>“Forgiven. I know, but we have yet to see Aslan. We have yet to be given a direction to go in.”</p><p>“As the High Queen, should you not be steering? Are you and your siblings not equal to Aslan?”</p><p>Susan wants to snarl, to dismiss it as blasphemy and move on. Unfortunately for her, she clearly remembers Aslan saying those very words at her coronation. He had declared them not only rulers, but creatures of the Deep Magic and of the Wild to be shaped by Narnia’s will as he had once been.</p><p>It is entirely possible that Aslan too had once been a son of Adam.</p><p>It is equally possible that one day Susan will be trapped in her other form. A form that Lucy had insisted was their true form. Though of course Lucy had insisted so, as she was a lioness.</p><p>“You should not speak of such things.”</p><p>She has shifted into her native tongue now, into the Old Narnian that takes him a moment to decipher. The rhythm is clearer to her, closer to the speech of the Dryads and the Merfolk both, her pitch low but no less tuneful.</p><p>“Professor Pevensie?”</p><p>Horace distracts her from the conversation at hand with some well timed English, she has to actually force herself to comprehend him. There’s a moment where her stomach drops and she understands not at all, but then she realises that Professor is in fact a title and not a horrifically garbled adjective.</p><p>“Yes Horace?”</p><p>Her accent is worse, thicker still. What a bother. At the sound of it something softens in her student’s face, and curiosity overtakes him. She cuts him off before he can chase those thoughts.</p><p>“Your question about today’s poems?”</p><p>He blushes, and stammers out something about battle weariness. There’s a wonderful tangent, and then Susan finds herself on the back foot because these children have never seen a single battle let alone a war. Their gun fights are glorified, half of their troops likely lose their guts when they come face to face with reality.</p><p>“It’s considered a mental impairment, although that’s not quite accurate. It is trauma remembered, brought back to the present. Scary things that haunt a man, do you understand?”</p><p>No, no comprende.</p><p>“Say you turn around now, and you shoot Janice in the face as her gender seems to offend you so?”</p><p>The look of horror on Horace’s face is comical. Just desserts for his previous behavoiur, at last.</p><p>“You’re not likely to forget it, are you? And in fact the next time you need to shoot a woman, her face comes back to you. That exact expression of shock she’s wearing now only painted crimson. Over and over until every time you see a woman’s face, whether you are aiming a gun at it or not, any similarities will reset your mind back to the moment of other horrific kills. Affected soldiers may be...twitchy, expecting to be hurt or to have to hurt. They may seem unsteady, flinch at triggers you don’t understand, tremble like a leaf for no obvious cause. Some might affect a limp, or blindness without any injury, many things.”</p><p>She recalls Edmund, when faced with a new winter, staring blankly at thin air for minutes at a time. He hadn’t stopped jumping at shadows for months. She herself is affected to a lesser extent, as expected with her decorated history she supposes. </p><p>“Tremors, as with frailty?”</p><p>She pauses, considers him, then glances down at her own hands. They are, in fact, shaking very characteristically. It is no longer a side effect of the animal under her skin, but due to the memories so close to the surface now. It might do. She gestures for Horace to come forward, and then holds out her hand, with Michael eying the spectacle with an odd expression on his face. Perhaps it is not proper?</p><p>“Can you feel that?”</p><p>Horace nods very quickly, releasing her hand as if burnt.</p><p>“Is my meaning any clearer?”</p><p>Another nod. Brilliant. Susan looks down on a classroom of nunners, resists the urge to roll her eyes, and her patience finally runs out.</p><p>“This session has ended, I believe you are due to bother Professor Crawley now.”</p><p>No movement. She turns, arms folded, eyebrows cocked, and they flee like a flock of doves.</p><p>What a trial.</p><p>“Was it the Battle of Hadark Bridge?”</p><p>Eustace had been reading up in his free time, or Caspian had been on about Susan’s prowess in battle again. He’s abandoned Narnian for English however, and Michael is in the room.</p><p>“Are the others affected the same?”</p><p>He insists on asking.</p><p>“Of course, we shared the same experiences, or similar enough.”</p><p>“But then how were you fit-”</p><p>“Are you implying that I am not fit?”</p><p>He splutters, turning a fetching shade of puce. Once he’s sufficiently embarrassed, Susan continues.</p><p>“If we had not been fit, we would have come home sooner, you know this.”</p><p>“But the doctors-.”</p><p>“The doctors who wished to use leeches to cure sepsis? Even the Telmarines knew to avoid weakening their patients as such.”</p><p>“You can’t deny there are more medical advances, and we are beyond such basics.”</p><p>“But you, equally, cannot deny the barbaracy of many modern methods.”</p><p>Especially, Susan doesn't say, compared to her sister's treatments. He concedes once again, careful not to reveal too much. But they can play pretend, if needs be.</p><p>“The vaccinations are incredible, you have to admit.”</p><p>She nods in assent.</p><p>“The food leaves much to be desired.”</p><p>Of course it does. Englishmen consider meat the height of extravagance after rationing, and now that the war is done with they ply their plates with beef and ham. With Eustace a dragon and Susan a Tiger, this is not a terribly offensive palate, but Narnia had catered to a wealth of vegetarian cultures. It’s a wonder neither of them are suffering from malnutrition.</p><p>It is entirely possible that magic has warped them enough to make a carnivorous diet possible, Susan resolved to try the cafeteria fare at her earliest convenience.</p><p>“You don’t think-?”</p><p>“I do.”</p><p>“Bollocks.”</p><p>She forgives him the slur for it is well earned, and turns to Mr Fairfax with a warm smile.</p><p>“Thank you for your timely intervention, my apologies for leaving the mess to you.”</p><p>“It was no trouble, ma’am. Although if you don’t mind my saying, you seem to have returned much upset by something.”</p><p>Another ally of Eustace, joy.</p><p>“I assure you, I am capable of continuing as normal.”</p><p>“Begging your pardon, ma’am, your hands are still shaking.”</p><p>So they are, so they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. She can’t explain that without sounding like she’s suffering from palsy however.</p><p>“Fortunately these sessions require my voice only.”</p><p>“And your continued good health.”</p><p>To hear such a phrase from an Englishman is frankly insulting, but he isn’t to know. She only smiles, concedes the point, and returns to her notes. Without the distraction of a good argument threatening to break out, she feels her blood burning with the Wild. Every breath she takes is filled with something potent, every one of her senses it heightened until it is utter torture, ratcheting up a notch every passing second. Her vocal chords thicken uncomfortably, her trachea fracturing and remodelling itself to suit her larger form as she does her best to stay still. It is no wonder Aslan is always a lion, if being anything else causes so much trouble.</p><p>This is the body she was born in, by all that is holy. This should not be so troublesome.</p><p>“Can I get you a drink?”</p><p>Eustace, the cheeky brat, earns himself a snarl that is entirely inhuman. It reverberates in her whole chest, every capable muscle contributing to the sound.</p><p>“Or a day off. Two, a week,<i> Susan </i>.”</p><p>“I’m fine, Eustace.”</p><p>Too deep, too rich, too thick with power. The tables before her shake, and that is evidence enough of her bold lie.</p><p>“Is there anyone who can help left?”</p><p>That is a low blow indeed.</p><p>“My sister is dead, my brothers are dead, my parents are dead, Diggory and MacReady are dead, Polly is dead- must I go on?”</p><p>Can she sound any more like a tiger? Probably, best not to risk bad luck.</p><p>Michael is trying to be one with the floor at this point, the pair pay him no heed.</p><p>“Then me! What can I do? Please!”</p><p>“Unless you can magically summon Him, we’re out of luck.”</p><p>He pauses gapes, then looks at her chest like a man depraved. Curious she follows to see if her near transformation has somehow given her a decent rack, only to find the chain on which a green ring hangs like a children’s toy.</p><p>“Oh.”</p>
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